When comparing SoundCloud vs TIDAL, the Slant community recommends SoundCloud for most people. In the question“What are the best music streaming services?”SoundCloud is ranked 5th while TIDAL is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose SoundCloud is:

You can subscribe to artists to be notified the instant they upload a new song or give an update.

Pros

Pro

Subscribe to artists

You can subscribe to artists to be notified the instant they upload a new song or give an update.

Pro

Recommendations

Links to related music, based on what you're listening to, can be found in the sidebar.

Pro

Follow people

You can follow people with similar tastes or that often find new music. When they favorite a song, SoundCloud will notify you about it.

Pro

Explore tab has new music constantly

Explore tab on SoundCloud shows trending music that can be filtered based on genre/tag. There's a constant stream of new music.

Pro

Free to use

You don't even have to log in or sign up for an account if you don't want to.

There are paid options for if you want to upload large quantities of audio (eg if you're a music label you'll need this), but it's free to download as much and as often as you like.

Pro

Pre-releases

Some music labels, especially newer ones, release on SoundCloud before anywhere else.

Pro

Creative Commons filter

SoundCloud allows for finding music that is licensed under Creative Commons.

Pro

Amazing quality

The Tidal music streaming service has a maximum streaming quality of 1,411Kbps bit rate with FLAC-formatted lossless files. This is quite an upgrade compared to most music streaming services, which go at about 320Kbps bit rate.

Pro

Built-in audio search

The Tidal music streaming service mobile app has a built-in audio search, similar to Shazaam and Soundhound.

Pro

Discounted student subscription

Tidal offers a 50% discount on monthly subscriptions for students with a valid university email account.

Pro

Pays artists more

As of March 2018, TIDAL pays the artists 2/3 more than Apple Music and 3 times more than Spotify, for an equivalent catalog and subscription price. (40M songs on TIDAL and Apple Music vs. 30M on Spotify, $9.99/mo for all 3). Napster is the only service that pays the artists more than TIDAL.

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Cons

Con

Interface is full of bugs

The SoundCloud website has tons of problems, including issues with notifications, favorites, and uploading sounds.

Con

Audio ads in some uploaded content

Some content on SoundCloud includes audio ads, particularly sponsored podcasts.

(Note that SoundCloud itself doesn't add these - all the audio you're hearing is exactly as it was uploaded.)

Con

Can't do an advanced search

You can't search, for example, for Creative Commons music with the tag #trap. It could be useful to search for music you like that is under Creative Commons.

Con

Expensive

At $19.99 per month, it's one of the most expensive streaming services out there (there is a cheaper subscription available at $9.99/month).

Con

Songs may take some time to load

the Tidal music streaming service may take up to 10 seconds of buffering to load and play a song, sometimes even stopping a song mid-way to buffer.

Con

Small music catalog

The music Catelog selection here is not that big. Other services have over 40 million songs.

Con

No free tier

The Tidal music streaming service has no free tier available. Only a 7-day trial. While the trial is helpful for learning what the service has to offer, it may not allow for a complete picture due to the time limit.

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